People occasionally ask me why this blog covers so much dark ground. Let’s see if I can explain:
My life has been much like any typical run. We all go through our sad and tragic episodes, with a lot of good times and beautiful experiences mixed in. There are happy moments and terrible moments. Some get swallowed up by the darkness and descend into a life of crime, addiction and death. Others find a way out of the darkness and learn to find joy in all the things they were once too blind to notice.
Mood music:
I write a lot about my darker episodes because there has always been a light at the end of the tunnel. I’ve learned to look at adversity as an opportunity to always get somewhere better. I also believe in the saying: “When you find yourself in hell, the only way out of it is through it.”
I write a lot about my addictive behavior so you can understand just how joyful it is when you find recovery.
I write a lot about what I went through at the hands of OCD, fear and anxiety because I found a way through the worst of it and believe I need to share where I’ve been so those who are in their own personal hell can see the way to some peace.
As awesome as my life is today, I still find myself veering into episodes of darkness. I’m not a special case. We all go through that sort of thing. This blog being part diary, I need to write down the bad as well as the good because by documenting it I can put things in perspective and push myself out of the painful periods.
I always try to end a darker post on a positive note. If you skim, you’ll miss it.
I’ve been through some rough patches lately and it has shown through here. But I never stay in the rough patch for long, because I keep moving and learning. Many of you help me do it, and I’m grateful.
I try to be like Leo, the chief of staff in the TV series The West Wing. The character was a raging alcoholic and pill popper who got through it and kept living a life of public service. This clip pretty much sums up the purpose of this blog:
I don’t know my way out of every dark situation, but by sharing stories of the struggles that ended well, I’m hopefully helping a few of you.
From the good folks at “Choose Happiness” — something to keep in mind when people get all snotty and hypocritical about who you are and what you do:
You are a person, not a Facebook status. Other peoples "like" is not needed. Everyone isn't going to like you and that's ok. Just make sure YOU like you...
A lot of people are furious over a bit from the last Republican presidential debate, in which an openly gay soldier was booed for asking if the candidates would, if elected, reverse the progress made on gays in the military.
Some people around the Internet have called the booing of a gay man “indefensible,” “disgusting” and “evil.”
There’s also a lot of anti-Texas commentary making the rounds, and a lot of comments about Republicans being gay-fearing racists.
People love to over-complicate things.
Since this blog is largely about exploring the dark side of the human condition and searching for the redeemable among us, I’m going to take a crack at assessing this:
First, I don’t think the truth of the matter is that Republicans as a party are gay haters. I don’t believe Texans as a whole are, either.
Individuals are gay haters and racists.
I’ve met Democrats, Republicans and Libertarians who have shown their intolerance. And I’ve seen and heard more venom drip from peoples’ mouths in the “liberal” state of Massachusetts than I have anywhere else. I live here, which explains why I hear more of it here than anywhere else. If I spent more than a few days in one of the southern states maybe I’d come away with a different point of view.
I’ve met very progressive (some would even say liberal) Republican southerners who would die to defend the rights of everyone, gay or otherwise.
We love to paint these things with one fat brush. I’m guilty of it, too.
The reality is that a couple assholes booed this guy. Of them, I think the boos were more toward the question than the sexual orientation of the guy asking it.
Personally, when anyone has the balls to ask a question for an event like that, I think they deserve respect. The booing people in the audience were straight-up jerks. But the action doesn’t necessarily make them gay bashers.
Angry? Sure. Ill-behaved? That’s fair. Haters? I tend to doubt it.
I’ve gotten some static lately over what I post and how often I post it. Much of the feedback is fair and I’m working on it, but I can’t help feeling like there’s a little hypocrisy going on.
Many of us have the same problem: We want to say what we want at will, but don’t want anyone else to do the same. I can be a hypocrite with the best of ’em, so I know I can’t get all high and mighty and defensive. I think this is just another byproduct of the social networking age. We all have this megaphone and we worry that if we don’t yell into it constantly, it’ll get taken away from us. Some people don’t have this problem, and post a lot more sparingly. I give them a lot of credit for their self control.
Mood music:
In my crankiness I’ve made a list of all the things on Facebook and Twitter that annoy me. Some of you will relate. None of you should take it too personally. I admit to using this post to blow off steam.
Blowing off steam is important for us, because it keeps us from exploding further down the line. So thanks in advance for indulging me.
In my moments of self pity and self righteousness, when someone takes issue with how I use my social networking tools, I get all red in the face, climb onto my high horse and think to myself, well, at least I don’t …
–Think I’m taking a big, brave stand by posting self-righteous and self-evident statements, daring the rest of you to repost if you agree.
–Insist on getting all lovey-dovey with my wife on Facebook for all to see, dropping words like “baby” and “honey” everywhere.
–Fight with my significant other on Facebook for all to see.
–Vilify others for their political and religious views, even though my own views are equally offensive to others.
–Push buttons for attention, though some have accused me of doing so.
–Whine nonstop about the weather. I feel pretty smart for realizing it’s perfectly normal for it to be hot in the summer and snowing in the winter.
–Whine about the latest Facebook layout changes, forgetting that it’s a free service and that I really didn’t like the last six layouts, either.
–Complain about my job constantly.
Since I don’t do those things, I guess that means I’m better than you.
I long ago lost count of how many times I’ve gotten in trouble for letting bad words spill from my mouth in a split second of carelessness. I’m from Revere. It happens.
When you run off at the mouth, people can be quick to judge you and label you for life. But those who judge forget how easily verbal gaffes happen. I saw a video clip on Youtube yesterday that reminded me of this. It’s from three years ago. Susan “Sue” Simmons, the lead female news anchor at WNBC in New York City, is heard dropping the F-bomb live on the air, and she’s forced to apologize after the commercial break:
I’ll admit that I laughed hard and replayed it many times over. In my defense, I was sitting in the airport bored and tired.
It’s hard for me not to sympathize with Simmons. Sure, it was unprofessional and offensive. But it was human and we’ve all done something like it. The difference is that she’s got a microphone clipped to her collar.
It only takes a split second to embarrass yourself.
Something to remember next time we feel like ridiculing someone for doing the same thing.
If someone offers me a drink and I tell them I’m sober, they accept it and that’s that. If I’m offered food that doesn’t fit my recovery program for compulsive binge eating, I can’t say it that way without getting odd stares.
This is something all compulsive binge eaters deal with in society — a big, ugly lack of understanding that destructive addictive behavior takes on many forms, and that food can be as destructive to the abuser as cocaine.
Mood music:
http://youtu.be/8YNfvl_qhVE
I’ve tried hard to raise awareness in this blog, but even regular readers don’t seem to get it when we’re together in a room and there’s a bunch of food I’m not touching. No flour? No sugar? That’s crazy. One friend suggested it was heavy handed of me to compare my experiences to the kind of hell a runaway alcoholic deals with.
With anxiety and depression I certainly understand, but when I think serious addictions I was thinking some sort of drug abuse – in fact heroin is what popped into my head. Alcohol also a possibility… but binge eating? Come on man. Everyone has a hard time knowing when to say when to junk food, Shit, I gotta throw it in the trash sometimes so I don’t eat it all.
For those who haven’t dealt with food as an addictive substance, his skepticism is understandable.
The second I tell someone I can’t eat what they offer me, the common question is if I am lactose or gluten intolerant. When I say no, the stares get more uncomfortable.
But here’s something I think is important for binge eaters in recovery: It’s unfair to get angry with people for failing to understand the connection between addiction and eating habits. We can’t expect everyone to magically understand. So my advice is that when asked, we just tell the person we have an allergy and walk away.
It’s not a lie. What is an allergy, after all? It’s the body’s inability to process certain substances. For a binge hound like me, I can’t process flour and sugar items because the switch in my brain that goes off when the proper intake is achieved doesn’t work. The more I have the more I crave, and I fill myself with it until I’m on the floor unable to get up.
Even the AA Big Book describes alcoholism as an allergy. It’s right at the beginning of the book in a chapter called “The Doctor’s Opinion,” in which Dr. William D. Silkworth writes:
We believe, and so suggested a few years ago, that the action of alcohol on these chronic alcoholics is a manifestation of an allergy; that the phenomenon of craving is limited to this class and never occurs in the average temperate drinker. These allergic types can never safely use alcohol in any form at all; and once having formed the habit and found they cannot break it, once having lost their self-confidence, their reliance upon things human, their problems pile up on them and become astonishingly difficult to solve.
For others, the same problems are not the result of a dependence on alcohol, but of any number of things like gambling, pain medication, spending, sex and, in my case, binge eating.
I’m getting better at resisting the urge to explain it to people. I just got back from a conference in New York where the question of why I didn’t eat certain things came up a few times. I just said I have an allergy and the discussion was over.
There’s a particularly insidious side of my OCD that I have to fight hard to contain, because it’s the thing most likely to destroy me. This is a story about paranoia.
Mood music:
Let’s start with a definition from Wikipedia:
Paranoia is a thought process believed to be heavily influenced by anxiety or fear, often to the point of irrationality and delusion. Paranoid thinking typically includes persecutory beliefs, or beliefs of conspiracy concerning a perceived threat towards oneself.
Anxiety and fear once played a major role in how my OCD manifested itself. I would become so full of fear about people, places and things that I would see conspiracies against me around every corner.
Working the night shift and then waking up after only a couple hours of sleep each night to spend time with the children eroded my sanity to the point where I was absolutely convinced that the day staff was conspiring against me.
I’d sit at home working the scenarios over and over in my head. I was certain that anything that went wrong with the morning deadline cycle would be blamed on me because of something I may or may not have done the night before. That turned into a constant feeling that a conspiracy was afoot to get me fired.
I would think about it day and night, ruining God knows how many precious moments with my wife and kids. I was right there with them at home or on family vacations. But mentally I was somewhere far away and dark.
Going further back to my late teens and early 20s, I would grow obsessed about what people thought of me: how I looked, how I talked and walked. I lost a lot of sleep worrying about something I took as a certainty: that people were talking about me behind my back, making fun of my mannerisms.
My mind would spin and spin until I was too much of a wreck to do anything but sleep.
I haven’t suffered with this stuff nearly as much in recent years because of all the work I’ve done to get my OCD under control. I’ve faced a lot of fears and killed them in the process. That has made me far less anxious, which in turn has made me far less paranoid.
But once in awhile, especially if my sleep is off, some of it will nudge its way back into my head. Not fear or anxiety, but a nagging feeling that somewhere people are talking about me, complaining about something I may have said or did.
I have to be on constant alert for those moments. You could say I have to be paranoid of the paranoia.
I’ve found some valuable weapons in the fight against this demon:
–I try most nights to be in bed as soon as the kids are in bed, so I can read or just fall asleep. When I get enough sleep, a lot of the wreckage in my head is cleared out.
–I hang on tight to a diet devoid of flour and sugar. The main reason is to control a binge-eating disorder. But as a pleasant byproduct, the absence of these things from my body has also had a clarifying effect.
–I make time to talk to fellow addicts and mental illness sufferers because when I help them sort out their emotions, I have less time to drown in my own mental juices. Besides, a lot of people do the same for me and giving it back is the least I can do. This is a double-edged sword though, because when you let enough people vent their emotions on you, the load can get heavy indeed.
–I have regular visits with my therapist, though I often suck at remembering when my appointments are.
What I’ve just mapped out isn’t perfect. Sometimes it’s very easy not to do the things I know I should do. In fact, that’s happened more in recent months.
But it’s like any kind of self improvement. You don’t have to perfect everything all at once. You can take baby steps and get to where you need to be.
The paranoia, like one’s addictions, will always be doing push-ups in the parking lot.
Sometimes, it will sneak up behind you and kick your ass.
But if you kick its ass more than it kicks yours, you’ll be winning the war.
It happens whenever I go on business trips: I stay up far later than I normally would (it was past midnight before I crashed last night) but I’m still back on my feet by 5 a.m. Fortunately, I’ve developed a system for getting through the morning.
Step 1: Take the weak-ass hotel coffee that room service just delivered and mix in a packet of Starbucks Via. The resulting concoction will get you half way to being awake. Use the resulting jolt to swallow breakfast without choking.
Step 2: Put on music of choice, unless it’s classical. For me this morning, it’s The Ramones. I’m in New York, which gives me the tendency to play nothing but The Ramones:
http://youtu.be/uLRiyDqYd60
Step 3: Brush teeth. Coffee is particularly excellent right after a good mouth cleaning.
Step 4: Start writing. This may seem harsh, especially if you’re not a writer. But it works for me. I’ll just start typing whatever falls loose from the mental cobwebs. Before I know it, I’ve put the needs of the coming day into perspective.
Step 5: Refresh the coffee cup.
Step 6: Turn up the volume on the music. This morning, it’s more of The Ramones.
http://youtu.be/WlnFleSasSs
Step 7: Now you’re awake enough to take a shower.
Step 8: Pull on boots and somehow find your way to the conference proceedings. You are now in a pretty good zombie state. Your brain is numb but you still find a way to talk to people and even do so politely. What’s more surprising is you manage to say a few intelligent things to the person you’re talking to.
Step 9: Sit through the morning keynotes with the laptop on in front of you. The goal is not to ignore the speakers. The extra stimulation of the glowing screen will keep you from dozing off entirely, which means you’re doing the speakers a favor. I’ve done enough talks to know it’s better to have people in front of you staring at a screen while you talk than snoring with the head cocked back and the mouth gaping.
Step 10: Coffee break. The first of many.
By this point, I’m ready to take on the world. And fortunately for me, the panel I’m moderating isn’t on until 3.
I can handle a couple days of this. By Thursday, I’ll be back to the more energetic morning routine of life at home.
I’ve written a lot about 9-11 in this blog. How could I avoid it? Nothing has fueled the fear, anxiety and depression of a nation like that terrible day. Whenever I’m here, I visit Ground Zero.
Part of it is a need to pay my respects to all who died there. Some of it is an obsessive-compulsive impulse. A lot of it is that whenever I see the construction workers hauling ass down there, it inspires me.
Mood music:
I’m here for my company’s annual Security Standard event in Brooklyn. Before setting my sights on the work at hand, I dumped my luggage and sprinted over the Brooklyn Bridge to Lower Manhattan.
Last year at this time, you couldn’t really see the scene taking shape at the WTC site from the bridge. Now you can. Walking over the bridge and looking to the left, there it is, rising up like a middle finger in the Manhattan sky:
One World Trade Center is taking shape. They’ve made major progress on it since I was here last September.
We’ve all been calling this Ground Zero since 9-11, but I don’t think it’s appropriate any longer. Too much life has returned to this place to keep calling it that.
I find the site extremely symbolic of the human condition at the heart of this blog.
We go through parts of our lives walking tall and feeling indestructible, just like we once thought the Twin Towers were impervious to life’s cruel twists of fate. Then something unexpected happens and we end up in ruins.
Then we have a choice to rise from the ashes and start over, or just go away.
I’d like to think I rose from the ashes of my earlier years. Crohn’s Disease and mental illness have taken their best shots at me and I’ve been reduced to rubble more than once. But I got up and I’m still standing.
I’m no special case. We all take our blows and most of us get back up.
Terrorists took their best shot and knocked those buildings to the ground, snuffing out thousands of precious souls in the process. But this city got back up and started over. Now new buildings are rising up, hopefully stronger than what was there before.
It’s like that Metallica song. We rise, we fall, we’re down and we rise again.
Perhaps I have a hyperbolic brain. But when I visit this place, that’s how it makes me feel.
Update March 19, 2012: I touched on this issue in today’s Salted Hash blog post on @CSOonline. There has been some good discussion on the matter of how often to tweet and how best to achieve variety. After reading this from my friend @Beaker, I remembered that I had indeed touched on the issue here as well…
I’m asked a lot lately why I push out multiple posts through the day and why many of them are repeats. Here’s what it’s about — and what I’m trying to do about it.
Mood music:
http://youtu.be/7v4umdrtWtg
There’s a professional and personal reason behind it. The professional part is that as someone who works in the media-publishing business, a big goal is always to get your content in front of as many eyes as possible.
I don’t apologize for a few reasons. One is that I don’t write this stuff so it’ll sit there unread. The other is that in the world of social media, people are coming online at different times of day. If you only post something in the morning, you miss the evening readers and vice versa. That’s why with new posts I typically post thrice daily: In the morning, around lunchtime and in the evening.
Social media is also like a rushing river. Especially Twitter and, to a lesser extent, Facebook. You put something in the water and it’s immediately flushed miles out of view by all the other waves people make. Some call it an echo chamber where you have to yell to be heard. That’s an accurate description, too.
As for the repeats, I do that because many of the posts in this blog are meant to be lessons you can retell when they can do the most good. At other times I like to think of them as songs worth replaying when the right mood strikes. Also, sometimes people will see a post for the first time months after it was first written.
Now for the personal side: It’s not your imagination. You ARE seeing one of my OCD ticks in action. Someone once called me an obsessive poster, and they were right. I’ll post things repeatedly just as someone with OCD might check a door lock or wash their hands repeatedly.
What am I trying to do about all this? The simple answer is that I’m working hard to post less each day. If I write something new, it runs three times, spread out as I described above. But I’m throttling back on repeats of the older stuff, because I do take your feedback to heart and want to do the right thing.
But when all is said and done, I will never be able to please everybody, nor should I try. I do what I do and if people want what I’m pushing they’ll stick around. Those who don’t want it should just unfollow or defriend me.
Or, as they used to say when all we had was radio and TV, if you don’t like what’s on, change the channel or turn it off.
